Search -
The Elm-Tree on the Mall; A Chronicle of Our Own Times
The ElmTree on the Mall A Chronicle of Our Own Times Author:Anatole France General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1910 Original Publisher: John Lane Subjects: Fiction / General Fiction / Classics Fiction / Literary Literary Criticism / European / French Notes: This is a black and white OCR reprint of the original. It has no illustrations and there may be typos or missing text. Whe... more »n you buy the General Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com where you can select from more than a million books for free. Excerpt: T is true that Abbe Guitrel, professor of sacred rhetoric at the high seminary of. . ., was intimately connected with M. le prtfet Worms- Clavelin and with Madame Worms- Clavelin, nte Coblentz. But Abbe Lantaigne was wrong in believing that M. Guitrel frequented the drawing-rooms of the prefecture, where his presence would have been equally disquieting to the Archbishop and to the masonic lodges, since theprtfet was master of the lodge " The Rising Sun." It was in the confectioner's shop kept by Dame Magloire in the Place Saint-Exupere, where he went every Saturday at five o'clock to buy two little three- sou cakes, one for his servant and the other for himself, that the priest had met the prtfefs wife, while she was eating babas there in the company of Madame Lacarelle, wife of M. le prtfefs private secretary. By his demeanour, at once obsequious and discreet, which inspired entire confidence and removedall apprehensions, the professor of sacred rhetoric had instantly gained the good graces of Madame Worms- Clavelin, to whom he suggested the mind, the face, and almost the sex of those old-clothes women, the guardian angels of her youth in the difficult days of Batignolles and the Place Clichy, when Noemi Coblentz had finished growing up and was beginning to fade in the business office kept by her father Isaac in the midst of distress-sales and police-raids. One of these dealers in second-hand clothes, a Madame Vacherie, who esteemed her, had acted as go-between ...« less